'Let us never be surprised when new variants emerge... It will never end unless we vaccinate and protect the whole world.'
By letting vaccine apartheid persist, said one expert,"we are playing whack-a-mole with variants—and the virus is winning."Epidemiologists are expressing little surprise at the emergence of a worrying new Covid-19 variant which has been identified in southern France—emphasizing that new mutations with varying degrees of severity will continue to crop up unless rich nations and Big Pharma end their refusal to lift patent protections and share vaccines with the world.
Abdi Mahamud, the agency's incident manager for Covid-19, told reporters in Geneva that the variant has not been declared a"variant of concern" at this point.the spike protein mutation that's been identified at N501Y, which scientists say can cause the strain to bind more firmly to human cells and spread in the body more easily, and E484K, which could potentially make it more resistant to vaccines.
"The fact that B.1.640.2 has now been detected for the first time in a returnee from Cameroon does not mean that the variant has also emerged in the Central African country,"on Wednesday."However, very low vaccination rates generally favor the emergence of new coronavirus mutations. In Cameroon, only 2.4% of the population is fully vaccinated, according to data from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in the United States.
The WHO's announcement that it is investigating variant IHU comes a week after researchers at Texas Children's Hospital, Houston's Baylor College, and the Indian pharmaceutical company Biological E. Limitedthey have developed an unpatented new vaccine called Corbevax which is at least 90% against the coronavirus.
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